from Claire Robinson, WEEKLY WATCH editor
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Dear all,

This week's issue is a LOBBYWATCH SPECIAL, simply because there's so much of it about! I've introduced the section with excerpts from one of the best articles I've read in a long time, by media expert David Miller, which goes a long way towards explaining how a world for the most part full of well-meaning people can end up being governed by a network of liars and con-artists. It's well worth reading in full if you can visit our web archive, and watch out for Miller's use of GM WATCH research in the article.

One reason the industry is shouting so very loudly is because the great GM exodus is continuing, with Anglo-Swiss firm Syngenta withdrawing from the UK and slinking off to the US (GM MELTDOWN CONTINUES). Naturally, this GM debacle is being painted by the usual suspects as a tragedy for plant science.

Claire    [email protected]
www.ngin.org.uk / www.gmwatch.org

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CONTENTS
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*LOBBYWATCH SPECIAL*
GM MELTDOWN CONTINUES
GM WATCH DISCLOSURE PROJECT
(SHOW US YER DATA!)
BAD-IDEA VIRUS LATEST: INDIA
OTHER GLOBAL NEWS
REST OF THE MONTH'S TOP STORIES
DONATIONS
ARCHIVE

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LOBBYWATCH SPECIAL!!
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+ Article of the Week: CAUGHT IN THE MATRIX
A superbly perceptive article by David Miller of Stirling University's Media Research Institute. Miller analyses the way today's neo-liberal system of governance is held together by a web of spin, lies and deception, which Miller calls the Matrix, after the movie: http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4010

Excerpts: Political debate in the US and UK mainstream increasingly resembles the dystopian vision encapsulated in the film the Matrix, where the reality of human bondage to the system is disguised by a sophisticated virtual reality - the matrix - from which it is difficult to break free.

In matrix world, Iraq had and may still have Weapons of Mass Destruction; in the real world, it did not. In matrix world, there were links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, in the real world there were not. ...

To many people who have witnessed the lies and deception of the past couple of years, our leaders seem deranged. Blair and his clique seem to have a tenuous grip on reality. How can it be - people wonder - that they can go on and on and on about Weapons of Mass Destruction when even the head of the Iraq Survey Group has concluded that they probably never existed? How can they appear to take so seriously statements that most of us now know are built on foundations no more secure than the shifting sands of the Iraqi deserts, which they no longer even pretend to search?

The attack on Iraq has revealed as never before the yawning gulf between the political elite and the rest of us. It discloses an increasing separation between 'matrix world' - where official pronouncements are treated with some seriousness, even if subject to criticism - and 'real world' where their lies are transparent and their crimes recognised. Matrix world and real world exist in a kind of parallel universe. But the matrix is not entirely hermetically sealed from the real world. Every so often, the distance between the two becomes too great and the matrix has to readjust. In the film itself, this is denoted by a glitch in the matrix where the character played by Keanu Reeves sees the same black cat twice within seconds. '

... Wholesale lying and misinformation by the political elite has been learned in part from the private sector and the PR industry, which has done so much to advance the interests of mobile global capital. Unsurprisingly, the PR industry is now being welcomed into the heart of government in the UK. ...

... We live in an age of fakery; spin in government and PR manipulation in business are used to force through unpopular policies or undermine democratic decision making. All over the world our rulers are attempting to hold the matrix together with ever extending propaganda programmes. The GM food lobby leads the way. In Johannesburg, the Third World farmers demonstrating at the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in favour of GM foods were "fake": bussed in, marshalled, press released and given T-shirts with English slogans, a language they didn't speak. On the Internet, GM interests have created "fake persuaders" to manipulate debate on scientific discussion groups and marginalise their critics. In the US, the Bush administration pays actors to produce fake news reports in favour of its policy on Medicare. In Turkey, BP's consultation on the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline included a telephone survey of a Turkish village of Hacibayram that, "had been deserted for many years, its houses having fallen into ruins. There were neither telephones nor anyone to answer them." In the UK, the Blair government "consultation" on GM simply ignored the overwhelming opposition of the public. It was, in other words, a fake consultation.

... The lies ... will not end when Blair or Bush go, they are the necessary product of the neo-liberal political system. The necessity to lie will only be undermined when governments start to enact the will of the people - in other words, after the current system is fundamentally reformed.

+ MEACHER REMINDS US GM FOODS NOT PROVEN SAFE Ex-environment minister Michael Meacher has written another spot-on piece in the Guardian about the health risks of GM food and lack of safety studies thereof.

Excerpt: The safety of GM food remains a very open question. And one is not encouraged when the guardian of our food safety, the Food Standards Agency, and particularly its chairman, John Krebs, is so strongly pro-GM. They naively rely on company data to prove the safety of GMOs, despite numerous reports which have revealed the dubious credibility of company studies. The FSA has also focused mainly on the safety of inserted GM material, and neglected the inherent risks of the gene insertion process itself, such as the production of new toxins and allergens.

... Against this background it is almost incredible, but true, that there have been no peer-reviewed clinical studies on the human health effects of GM food. Instead, when the biotech companies manufacture a new GM product, they compare it with its non-GM counterpart in terms of nutrients, toxins and allergens, and if they allege it to be "substantially equivalent", they deem it to be safe.

Such an assumption would never be allowed in the regulation of pesticides or drugs. It is simply a device to circumvent direct trials of the effects of GM foods on human health, and ensures that GM crops can be patented without even animal testing. http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=3922

+ PRO-GM LOBBYISTS GUNNING FOR MEACHER
Naturally, the biotech brigade's lobbyists did not let Meacher's article pass without comment. A letter duly appeared in the Guardian from Prof Sir Colin Berry, who is part of the industry-friendly pro-GM lobby group, the Scientific